Name: Drone Master
Tier: Unique or Legendary (depending on ease of use)
Damage: ~10(?)
Speed: 1 sec
Gender: Female
Range: 0 or 1
Element: Metropolis
Cost: between 4000 and 15000 (depending on tier)
(Does not attack... directly)
,Drone Fleet
Sends drones to attack creeps. 5 drones (+1/9 levels).
Drones have global range but need to return to Drone Master for resupply.
Pew-pew
Drones attack quickly with many weak attacks before returning.
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Explanation:
Drone Fleet
This means the Drone Master uses drones to deal damage. Since the drones need to fly to the target, Drone Master can deal high damage to nearby creeps, but only limited damage to far away creeps.
Pew-pew
This means that the drones attack differently than towers: instead of dealing full damage at normal speed, it deals reduced damage with rapid attacks for ~0.5 sec before returning to Drone Master.
edit: This allows the drones to feel better to use and allows them to scale smoothly. If they attacked at tower speed, then they'd only get 1 attack until you reached 100% bonus speed, then you'd get 2 attacks, and so on. With the 10x speed, itscales better.
/edit
While the exact implementation isn't important for the player, I'm envisioning something like this:
Drone attacks at 10x normal speed, but deal 10% the listed damage.
I think drone flight speed should also scale with attack speed, but having the drones attack faster and fly faster would be using the attack speed stat twice.
To prevent attack speed double scaling, I suggest the drones scale by the square root of attack speed for flight speed and attack speed. With the 10x pew-pew multiplier, this gives a max attack speed of once per frame at the expected attack speed.
edit
Item interactions (how I see them working)
Mjölnir and on-hit items like withered set:
Since the Drone Master isn't attacking, on-hit effects like Mjölnir wouldn't work.
Rabbit snowglobe, trident and tentacles:
Could this give extra drones? It should be balanced since most towers start with 1 attack and get double or more attacks. This would start with ~10 attacks and get a few more.
Area of affect attacks, Messerschmidt's Reaver, dandelion snowglobe
The balancing effect of Reaver is that it reduces tower range. I can't see this being fair and I think it should be treated like other on-hit items.
/edit
The Drone Master should have some delay when sending out drones so they aren't all on top of each other. Perhaps have Drone Master resupply 1 drone per some fraction of attack cooldown.
Andy would need to find a clever solution for tracking the creeps it's going to attack. Maybe give the drone a range of 1 and send the drone to the expected creep location and only reroute if the creep is out of range when it arrives.
Or this could be a rare or uncommon tower with just 1 drone.
Drone pilot
Tier: uncommon or rare
Damage: ~30(?)
Speed: 1 sec
Gender: Female/male
Range: 0 or 1 (or maybe make this ~4 and be the flight range of the drone)
Element: Metropolis
Cost: 400 or 1200
Pet drone
Sends drone to attack creeps. Range ~4?
Drone needs to return to resupply.
Pew-pew
Drones attack quickly with many weak attacks before returning to resupply.
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This would work similar to the post above, but since it's a single drone, AOE attack wouldn't be broken and rabbit snowglobe could either give extra drones or let the one drone attack multiple targets.
This could be reworked into an aircraft carrier for Metro in the next season with Water towers.
Replace drones with planes... Or keep it as drones. Example art:
Although, that's not very metro looking. I guess my original vision for that artwork was more of a goth-punk style drone pilot.
Although, that's not very metro looking. I guess my original vision for that artwork was more of a goth-punk style drone pilot.